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An anonymous reader writes "It's been 25 years since the Exxon Valdez dumped 11 million gallons of crude oil in Prince William Sound, and you can still find oil sticking to rocks. Worse yet, scientists say the oil could be around for decades yet to come. From the article: 'There are two main reasons why there's still oil on some of the beaches of the Kenai Fjords and Katmai National Parks and Preserves in the Gulf of Alaska, explains Gail Irvine, a marine ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey and lead researcher on the study. When the oil first spilled from the tanker, it mixed with the seawater and formed an emulsion that turned it into a goopy compound, she says. "When oil forms into the foam, the outside is weathering, but the inside isn't," Irvine explains. It's like mayonnaise left out on the counter. The surface will crust over, but the inside of the clump still looks like mayonnaise, she explains.'"

Consequences only exist for those too poor to fight them. Exxon should have been made responsible for taking care of the entire area until all the oil was cleaned up, but that would have driven them out of business...and we can't have that!

to be fair, if you punished them so hard that they went out of business, then they wouldn't be able to clean up. ideally you punish them enough so they pay a lot while remaining in business a long time to continue to pay a lot.

The problem lies in the definition of "just" - the term is too subjective.

Also, let's think more than two steps ahead here: sure, you could seize the assets of every board member - that would get you approximately what, a few hundred million? Maybe a couple of billion at first blush? Well, probably not: consider that most of their easily-seizable assets are tied up in the company's stock, and that such a simple announcement of seizure would cause that stock value to evaporate almost overnight. Hell, I doubt

What about the shareholders? You couldn't do it without them. Why should they be absolved of liability for the behavior they funded? Oh, because people might not invest willy-nilly in any random bullshit? Gee, that would be terrible. We all know that oil companies do evil and we all know they need our money to do it.

The whole point of a corporation is to pretend it's not individual people doing something, it's a entity called the corporation. The other essential part of the corporation is it can evaporate instantly when needed, with very little of the profits evaporating. This is not true of pot smokers, which is why it works for pot smokers but not for corporations. Everyone has been pretending it for so long that holding the individuals responsible is unthinkable in politics, and has been for as long as I've been alive.

That said, some profits would evaporate with the corporation, it's not a painless procedure, so I would have preferred that.

My better idea is to stop looking for scapegoats every time there's a catastrophe. Bad events happen because humans (including the suit-wearing ones) can't predict the future. Sometimes a whole set of good decisions lead to bad events, and we don't accomplish anything good be punishing people for things they can't foresee.

An environment of safety is something that can be set by the top. China beats the US in lots of metrics. One reason is that a guy on a loading dock makes an error, and the CEO can lose his head over it (actual death penalty). If that accountability was used in the US, you honestly think that nothing would ever change?So nobody could have foreseen any ill consequences from putting a drunk in charge of an oil tanker that has a complicated and dangerous route?

Punishment doesn't work on *individuals* because it's not reasonable to expect them to know all the nuance of laws affecting them in their daily lives.

Punishment works for *corporations* because they are have the resources and training to know what laws affect them as they go about their business. I don't disagree that there should be strong incentives for good safety protocols and environmental protection standards, but that should not preclude the use of equally strong disincentives for violations.

Regulatory control should not be so weak and subject to influence that gigantic corporations guilty of gross negligence actually have bargaining power in these situations; they need to be at the mercy of regulators and of the public.

Regulatory control should not be so weak and subject to influence that gigantic corporations guilty of gross negligence actually have bargaining power in these situations; they need to be at the mercy of regulators and of the public.

That would be unjust. Justice means among other things that one who is accused of crimes is allowed to defend themselves.

If a person was treated like a corporation, murder would be legal. You could walk up to somone with 10,000 witnesses, 10 video cameras coving you, then shoot someone. If you were tried for it, you'd challenge the prosecution to prove you didn't have a muscle spasm that caused the trigger pull.

The captain, the first officer, and the captain's boss should have ended up in jail, unless the helmsman could prove he called Exxon's safety line and reported erratic b

The consideration I will give them is: people who, individually or collectively, have billion-dollar legal budgets, powerful influence on public policy and have executive control over major operations that affect billions of average people need to held to a higher standard of transparency and accountability in the context of their corporate life.

...Because, of course, it's the board that chooses what route to take through a narrow channel, and the maintenance plan for the radar, and the sleeping schedule on the ship.

So you are asserting that no employee or contractor of Exxon knew about the captain's problem until after the crash?

Because that captain had a boss. If that boss knew nothing about the captain's performance, he's incompetent. And so on up the chain. Corporations are shields because we hold nobody responsible for anything. So they act like spoiled 3 year olds, knowing there's nothing they can't cry their way out of.

The basic premise of capitalism is that the guy with the capital takes both the financial risks and the financial rewards. Labour prostitutes itself to capital for the best deal it can get. The government sets and enforces the rules of trade (ie: the "market"), some are closed markets (eg: plutonium market), others are "free" for anyone to participate (eg: NYSE). However without government regulations (in particular property law), there is no "free market" or any other kind of market, the entire edifice sim

While I understand the feeling, you can also make it hurt so much that they no longer bother.

What if they just sell off their assets and move on with life?

Think of it like child support, which already has gone too far in many cases. Many people are ordered to pay more than they really can (yes, there are deadbeats too), so they do work for cash to keep it "off the books".

You can only "punish" people so hard before they change their behavior, the harsher the punishment, the more they will change to avoid it

Who would buy them if there is a standing order to clean up a mess before they can turn a full profit again? And who cares if they do? We want the beaches cleaned up first and foremost, and we want the assets that causes the fuck-up to pay the price. It doesn't really matter who holds the assets at any given time. Sure, revenge would be nice too.

Who would buy them if there is a standing order to clean up a mess before they can turn a full profit again?

You assume they'd sell the whole thing in one go. Most folks who run a corporation are smart enough to start spinning off new companies, each taking a substantial chunk of the assets until all you have left of the old one is the name, an office somewhere, and maybe a desk and chair in it. If you're lucky there may be a working telephone on the desk.

Sounds like maybe you should pony up then. One of the problems with pollution mitigation is that it uses Other Peoples' Money and is mandated by people who don't care how expensive it is to clean up pollution to a arbitrarily low level. This leads to creation of externalities by the regulators - fining businesses and whatnot for effort that no one else would willingly pay for.

I think that large fines should have a deductible, just like most insurance does. If Exxon pays a $900 million payment for cleanup

So what if they do? The entire concept of a corporation is a legal fiction, we can set the rules to be whatever we like.

Rule 1 - No corporation may engage in any activity in which the costs of repairing any public/environmental/etc. damage from a worst-case scenario cannot be covered by liquidating company assets. No hiding the assets behind shell corporations allowed.

Rule 2 - In the aftermath of a catastrophe if corporate assets fall to within N% of the estimated recovery costs the company will be immedi

No corporation may engage in any activity in which the costs of repairing any public/environmental/etc. damage from a worst-case scenario cannot be covered by liquidating company assets.

This will severely restrict the number of companies who can work in any given field, leading to lack of competition and all of the inefficiencies that follows from that.

Why not allow the companies to take out insurance for such events? That would (ideally) make the payment scale directly with the risk of failure, so that new companies can start a small operation without massive investments, and so that companies that have bad policies are punished for having the bad policies, not for the failures that th

Fair enough, provided that funding for repairs is *guaranteed* meaning that even if a catastrophe is due to gross negligence or intentional sabotage, some combination of insurance and company liquidation will still cover it. And that the insurance company has to be able to cover their liabilities even if several unrelated catastrophes occur in the same bad year. That's going to drive the cost of insurance through the roof, much like medical malpractice insurance, and that means we'd be siphoning a pretty

The problem is that a lot of activity would then become impossible for almost any corporation. For example Fukushima is looking like it will end up in the hundreds of billions of dollars range to sort out, and few energy companies are worth that much. Also after such an accident the value of the company's other assets would likely plummet, e.g. because of safety issues that were discovered and now need putting right.

It's the same with insurance. The oil industry just doesn't have enough and the nuclear indu

So? If you don't want to risk your savings don't invest in companies that take big risks - it's hardly a new investment strategy. What difference does it make if the company is privately owned or publicly traded? You own a percentage of a company, you always take the risk that it goes belly up tomorrow for unexpected reasons. Stockholders are already protected by the corporate veil from any losses beyond their stock tanking, why should they get any extra consideration?

Your average investor who owns stock via their 401(k) or other mutual fund investment isn't able to make such choices...

You would harm the economy and put investment capital at risk in new ways, the law of unintended consequences applies here. Your ideals are good, but your methods would have results far different from what you intend.

It would definitely have the effect of reorganizing markets. I would go farther and make the shareholders responsible for companies debts as well in a bankruptcy. If you don't want to risk getting on the other side of financial sell the company bonds which will now be safer because I'll be back by the shareholders pocketbooks, of course you can't get all the upside only whatever the preagreed amount of interest is.

The current system that really is socialized risk and losses and private gains. While it h

You are attacking the very stated purpose of permitting corporations to exist in the first place - to allow investors to collaborate without exposing themselves to risk beyond losing their investment. Now there's an interesting conversation to be had there, but consider - do you really want to risk everything you own because your 401k was partially invested in a company responsible for some massive catastrophe? Personally I think simply requiring the corporations to possess assets and/or malpractice insura

Well obviously we wouldn't want to apply such market-changing regulations retroactively, and 401k's tend to shoot for relatively low risk investments, so presumably the fund managers would simply move to less risky investments. And if corporations want to attract more investors then they have great incentive to actually implement state-of-the-art safety systems and painfully transparent independent oversight.

Would it hurt inherently high-risk industries like oil and nuclear? Probably. But if those indust

Some 401(k)s are low risk, but plenty are not. After all, in 2009, a whole lot of them went down a lot in value. If they were such low risk, that wouldn't have happened.

Your comment that renewable energy is cheaper than oil and nuclear indicates that you have an agenda... No, they really aren't, if they were, companies would be making money hand over fist with them...

In truth, your comments and views seem to be of a socialist nature... which isn't a crime, but we don't live in a socialist country.

Renewables have their issues, most prominently the need for energy buffering, but the cost of production is not one of them. Without the extensive subsidies, tax breaks, and grandfathered immunity to environmental regulations, it's estimated that fossil fuels would cost 2-3x as much as they currently do, and renewables are already approaching or exceeding price-parity with fossil fuel based energy. That's why in much of the world an unsubsidized private solar installation on your home can already pay for

Your average investor who owns stock via their 401(k) or other mutual fund investment isn't able to make such choices...

Bullshit. The average investor is perfectly free to choose not to hold funds that include Exxon.

(Personally, I think the risk is worth it anyway... I hold total-market index funds, and would be perfectly fine with the fraction of value represented by Exxon going to zero if that were necessary for the clean-up. Oh noes, my VTI decreased by 2.15% -- whoop-de-fucking-do!)

Sometimes that is the point of punishment, to get them to change their behavior... but sometimes it isn't...

After all, when you put someone to death, clearly you aren't going to get them to change anything (other than prevent them from doing it again).

And frankly, it doesn't seem to deter much crime either, the general view seems to be that people don't think they'll get caught or don't think it will happen to them. So punishing someone else doesn't seem to do much outside of minor punishments for minor c

No company folds because of reduced profit. Taking half the profit means they're getting rich at a slower pace, it cannot put the company in trouble. Child support wouldn't be bankrupting anyone if it were a percentage of profits after deducting all living expenses, either.

How you live your life and how capital is invested in companies is not the same thing.

If you take half of a company's profits, then the investors in that company have to decide if the return on investment is still worthwhile. They may well put their money into another company that has no such restrictions and make more profit.

Capital gets invested in projects that return enough in profit to make the investment worthwhile. Take away half that profit and the company may no longer

You say that like you think every executive gets out of bed in the morning saying "Today, I'm going to fuck over the world. I think I'll start with that pesky Alaskan wildlife."

Close enough. "Today, I'm going to go make some money, and if it hurts people, fuck 'em." Explain in detail why that is not accurate if you disagree — it seems to match up perfectly with the behavior of every petroleum company.

If the oil companies had their way, the spill would not have taken place. The Business Proposal was the Mackenzie Valley pipeline. The environmental folks opposed it because it. There were hearings and it was denied. "The noise of construction might frighten the caribou.!", etc.

Perhaps we should assess every person (and their heirs if they are no longer alive) who bought gasoline from Exxon over the prior 20 years an annual surcharge. After all, they presumably benefited in the form of lower prices derived from Exxon (and most everyone else) not using more collision resistant tankers. These people should have, instead, sought out the most ecologically friendly oil company's products - they instead chose to bury their heads in the sand and go with the lowest cost gasoline and were

Then again, no one on the board knew of the captain's little toke habit, and I doubt that they knew anything about the efficacy of their cleanup plan beforehand, at least outside of having some ostensibly smart consultants say "oh, this will work perfectly!"

Alternate option - make it the norm that if a corporation fucks up badly enough that it can't make things right out of petty cash, then *all* stock is immediately frozen until the problem is solved. Give investors incentive to do their due diligence and avoid investing in anyone who's prone to cutting corners in ways that jeopardize the public.

Of course for that to work we might also need some supporting laws - for example knowingly selling off stock before a freeze should be treated as a particularly hein

if you punished them for 30 billion dollars then you would have the 30 billion dollars for the cleanup and if it was too much the remaining tankers and oil refineries sold to highest bidder so I don't really see the downside there..

I don't see it mentioned in this article, but I've read that part of the problem is that existing cleanup methods cause more damage to the enviornment than the oil does. The scrubbing, soaps and such required damages the coastline as well. It's faster to let it degrade naturally, though that can take decades with the colder temperatures up there.

if you punished them for 30 billion dollars then you would have the 30 billion dollars for the cleanup and if it was too much the remaining tankers and oil refineries sold to highest bidder so I don't really see the downside there..

...which would last only as long as it takes for prices at the gas pump to skyrocket, at which point the public would take up pitchforks and torches and demand that the company's assets be put back to work again immediately.

There really aren't that many oil companies out there, and taking one out would put a pretty big dent in the global logistics. Petroleum, like Spice, must flow.

"if you punished them so hard that they went out of business, then they wouldn't be able to clean up" So you're saying they should pay huge deposits before they get to do such potentially catastrophic shit? Agreed.

Maybe this type of work, so important to all mankind, shouldn't be left in the hands of private enterprise?

Government does some things really well. For example, the Social Security Administration is almost unfathomably efficient, compared to other large national or private retirement systems. For example, the overhead of SS is less than 3%, compared to something like 30% for Chile's privatized retirement system, lauded by conservatives.

The United States Post Office is also very economically efficient, especially considering how hemmed in they are by Congress. How people can both believe that post office workers are lazy, yet at the same time be so stressed out and overworked as to be the archetype for "going postal", I'll never understand. Cognitive dissonance at its finest.

Of course, if all you listen to are the whining pundits and conventional snark, you wouldn't realize this. But disimpassioned academic studies have shown these and other systems to be stellar performers.

OTOH, locating, recovering, shipping, and distributing oil and oil products is a very complex, capital intensive business with a rapid pace of development and subject to extreme market volatility. That's pretty much the opposite thing that government bureaucracies are good at. It's also why they find it hard to regulate such industries without unleashing a parade of unintended consequences. Nationalized oil companies are some of the most inefficient and corrupt bureaucracies ever established. To anybody who despises Exxon, Shell, etc, I suggest you take a look at companies like Pemex (Mexico), Petronas (Malaysia), etc, including their environmental impact. Many times when there's a spill they don't even bother trying to clean it up, let alone do a poor job of it.

Government does some things really well. For example, the Social Security Administration is almost unfathomably efficient, compared to other large national or private retirement systems. For example, the overhead of SS is less than 3%, compared to something like 30% for Chile's privatized retirement system, lauded by conservatives.

Efficiency is worthless unless it is also effective. I can be very efficient digging a hole and filling it back in.

How people can both believe that post office workers are lazy, yet at the same time be so stressed out and overworked as to be the archetype for "going postal", I'll never understand. Cognitive dissonance at its finest.

Lazy is not a term I've heard describe postal workers very often, but that term justifies your rant so whatever. My dad retired as a postal worker, was even part of the intervention team dealing with workplaces to prevent people from "going postal". It wasn't about being stressed out and overworked. It's a combination of low barriers of entry for the job, conflicting personalities, etc. Be

Keep in mind that all Social Security is supposed to do is write checks that people cash.

You wrote that as if it was fact rather than your opinion of how it should be. If that was on purpose, you appear to be somewhat uninformed with respect to the charter and organizational structure of the Social Security Administration. You really should read up on it, as over your lifetime you and the people you work for will be pouring a lot of money into it.g

More precisely, private enterprise is good at cutting corners (costs) while charging as much as possible. If you want to add 30% to your cost for a critical service, like health insurance, privatize it.

The problem with this strategy is that you are restricting who can realistically go into the petroleum business, and thus restricting the competition. Perhaps forcing the companies to have a insurance to pay for cleaning up would be better? That would scale with the size of the operation, so it wouldn't force a oligopoly, while companies that did too little to safeguard their operation would be punished by higher insurance rates.

Exxon should have been made responsible for taking care of the entire area until all the oil was cleaned up

It would be far better to fine them, and then use the money for something that actually makes sense. Spraying harsh detergents into the water is doing more harm than good. Wiping rocks off with paper towels is just moving the oil from one place to another while consuming lots of paper towels. Neither would make much difference on a coastline a thousand miles long. Instead, the money should be spent on prevention: double hulled tankers, better navigation equipment, faster/better first responders, etc.

I see your triple hull and raise you - quadruple hull should be required.

At some point, of course, the tanker will be carrying one quart of crude and tens or hundreds of thousands of gallons of diesel to power the ship that carts that precious quart of crude around with "ultimate" safety. Occasionally the ship will crash and release all of its diesel fuel, but that quart of crude that is in the container with 20 one foot layers of stainless steel tanks around it will survive and won't sully a rock somewhere

Why is everything couched as if it's either; a tiny pittance of responsibility or "they go out of business -- JOBS - OMG!!!"? That was a rhetorical question. It's advantageous to companies like Exxon that the argument always be; Free Enterprise vs. No Enterprise.

Exxon got the contract to extract the oil from the Inuit because they PROMISED to have radar and warning systems set in place and not crash their tankers. The "big lie" is that a one drunk captain crashed the ship -- and he went along with it. Ther

25 years ago, this WAS considered an adequate cleanup. This may shock Slashdot, but we're come very far since then. That's why the Deepwater Horizon spill cleanup was so effective.

Perhaps it would help if I quoted the part of the article that WASN'T in the summary:

Researchers aren't sure how much oil remains ensconced under these boulders&#226;&#8364;"that would require a different kind of study. "We think it's low levels," says Irvine. "Quite frankly, I didn't think [oil] would be there becaus

Aside from differences in the type of crude, I suspect that the breakdown speed has a lot to do with water temperature. The bacteria that eat the crude probably do a lot better in the warm Gulf waters than in Alaska.

The oil in the ground is undigested because there is no oxygen present, not because it takes a long time to digest it. n-alkanes, some of the most abundant compounds in oil, are the ones that are eaten first by bacteria once the oil is in the environment.

I'm not a fan of oil tankers. They tend to spill and waste a lot of oil. Moving oil by rail is better, they don't spill as often or as much when they do. Pipelines are the best means we have to move oil. They spill much less often and are much easier to fix.

I submit I am the highest authority on this specific subject here on slashdot. I grew up in Valdez, AK, the closest town to the spill. I was there when it happened. There is some documentary footage somewhere of myself and my siblings at one of these oil-soaked beaches. I've known friends to go out and do these beach surveys looking for oil, and I've fished and kayaked throughout Prince William Sound.

Firstly I have to say that, unless one goes specifically looking for it, this oil is invisible. The environment has entirely recovered, the salmon run is healthy, and there are as many sea birds, sea otters, and sea lions as there ever have been.

Secondly, the other posters make a very good points about the relative safety of oil tankers vs oil pipelines. I will additionally say that tankers are better protected from deliberate damage than pipelines. I don't know where you're getting your costs from, but I make the average oil tanker to be in the $100M range, and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System cost $8B.

I don't know if you know about it, but there is also a proposed natural gas pipeline which was intended to run through Canada to the States. Extrapolating from the cost per mile of TAPS, an oil pipeline would probably be in the range of $15B. Setting aside whether it is actually better for the environment, it is a lot easier to suggest that environmental concerns trump economic ones when it's not your $15B.

Nuclear power is probably a good option for Alaska, whereas solar is pretty much off the table. Hopefully one day someone will take advantage of the tidal energy in the Cook Inlet as well, one lobe of that (Turnagain Arm) having the third-highest tides in the world. There are one or two problems though with putting nuclear reactors in geologically active places though, and the NRC isn't exactly putting applications through quickly at the moment.

Personally though, from having witnessed one of the larger oil spills in history, I don't really find them all that concerning.